Foxcatcher: the tale of two Olympic stars and an offer they should have refused

In the late 80s, close brothers and Olympic wrestling stars Dave and Mark Schultz were lured by a wealthy eccentric to set up a training camp on his vast estate. It ended in disaster with the brutal murder of Dave Schultz. Here his wife, Nancy, tells the extraordinary story, now the subject of the film Foxcatcher starring Steve Carell

John E du Pont aims a pistol during pentathlon training, 1966. In 1996 he was to murder wrestler Dave Schultz, shooting him at close range. Photograph: Bill Ingraham/AP

On Friday 26 January 1996, Dave Schultz had to collect his children from school. Although everyone agreed he was a devoted father to Alexander, nine, and six-year-old Danielle, he could be a bit absent-minded. So, just to be sure, he had written a reminder on the back of his hand in marker pen: “Pick up kids”.

It was winter in Pennsylvania and the ground was thick with snow. Before he made the short journey in his blue Toyota Tercel station wagon, Dave wanted to fit the car with a new radio. He went outside into the driveway, leaving his wife, Nancy, in the house. They lived in the grounds of the sprawling estate of eccentric millionaire John Eleuthère du Pont. It was as Dave was tinkering with the Toyota’s dashboard that a Lincoln Town Car slid up the driveway behind him, wheels crunching in the snow. The driver’s window rolled down and du Pont stuck his arm out of the window. In his hand was a .38 calibre revolver.

“You got a problem with me?” du Pont asked Dave. And then he pulled the trigger.

The first shot hit Dave’s elbow. The second, his chest. Nancy ran out of the house just in time to see du Pont fire the third shot into her husband’s back. Screaming, she sprinted indoors to call 911. Dave was a former Olympic wrestling champion who, along with his brother Mark, had won a gold medal at Seoul in 1984, but even he wasn’t strong enough to withstand three shots at close range. When Nancy ran back outside, du Pont had gone and her husband was dying.

“I said ‘I love you’, right before he passed away,” she recalls now, almost 19 years later. “I was going to try and stop the bleeding but when I turned him over, it was just awful – his back was completely soft. There was nothing to push on. So I knew he was in bad shape. I put my head on his lap and I told him I loved him.”

Nancy Schultz with her son, Alexander, and daughter, Danielle, days after the murder of her husband. Photograph: Horry Rumph Jr/AP

Dave died in her arms. He was 36. Nancy had to ask her friends to step in and pick up the kids while she went with her husband to the hospital, where he was officially pronounced dead. After that, there were the police interviews to get through. She didn’t get back home till 9.30 that night. Then she had to tell her children.

“I sat them down and said: ‘John du Pont shot your father today and your dad is dead,’” she says, quietly. “That’s the worst thing that I’ve ever had to do.”

The couple had been happily married for 15 years, ever since they met in junior year at the University of Oklahoma. He was a college wrestler and the team wouldn’t allow him to travel to matches with his girlfriend unless they were married.

“Dave said: ‘Do you want to go to the championships?’” Nancy recalls. “I said: ‘Sure.’ He said: ‘You’ve got to marry me then.’ He asked me on a Tuesday and we got married on the Thursday.”

Dave Schultz waves after receiving the gold medal in the 163-pound freestyle wrestling event at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Photograph: AP

She was “infatuated” with Dave from the moment they met. “He was a lovely family man,” she says. “He had a lovely, childlike quality. The world…” she breaks off, searching for the right expression, “…it was always fresh to him. He continued to discover the world all the time. He had an inquisitive, joyful personality and when we had kids, he saw the world through their eyes. He was very involved.”

The sad and bizarre story of Dave Schultz’s murder is soon to be retold on the big screen in Foxcatcher, a film directed by Bennett Miller (the director of Capote and Moneyball) and starring Steve Carell as du Pont, Mark Ruffalo as Dave Schultz and Channing Tatum as his younger brother, Mark. Nancy is played by Sienna Miller. The film has already scooped Miller the best director award at the Cannes film festival and there is considerable Oscars buzz around Steve Carell’s career-defining performance.

For a long time, Nancy couldn’t watch the actors’ portrayal of the murder. At private screenings in the run-up to the movie’s release, she would step outside at the crucial moment.

“It was very hard,” she says. “They performed that scene exactly as Dave’s murder happened.”

A relentlessly bleak and compelling piece of work, Foxcatcher is notable for the intensity of both performance and plot. For this is not just a story about wrestling and madness. This is a story about the need to belong, the corrupting and isolating power of wealth, the potency of a shared delusion and the inescapable frailties that make us all human. It is a story of love, loss and betrayal. And it is a story, too, of a woman whose husband was shot dead in the driveway and of two kids whose father did not pick them up from school.

John E du Pont was a man the Schultz family knew well. Ten years before Dave Schultz’s murder, du Pont had decided to establish himself as the biggest sponsor of American wrestling. As a boy, he had loved the sport and had nurtured ambitions to be a professional athlete but his mother had forbidden him from wrestling at high school and he was never cut out to be a world-class competitor.

As an adult, he bought his way in, using his considerable fortune to gain access to the wrestling community’s highest ranks. Du Pont inherited around $46m in 1985 from the family business, American chemical giant DuPont. A year later, he decided to establish a wrestling programme at the nearby Villanova university. When he went in search of a coach, he wanted the best money could buy.

In the late 1980s, the Schultz brothers were wrestling royalty: the only sibling pair to win both world and Olympic championships, amassing more titles than any American brother combination in history. At first, du Pont approached Mark, the younger brother, tempting him to join the Villanova programme with the promise of a $24,000 a year job and a home on the Foxcatcher estate, the du Pont family’s 800-acre residence in Pennsylvania. Mark was short of money: USA Wrestling didn’t pay its athletes, unlike the Soviet team, whose athletes received a wage from the government. Mark had just been fired from his post as an assistant coach at Stanford university and was struggling to make ends meet. For him, it was a case of joining the marines, going on welfare or accepting the job and pursuing the sport he loved. He took the job.

But he had his reservations about du Pont.

“I knew something was wrong with him the first two seconds I laid eyes on him,” Mark writes to me in an email. Du Pont struck him as “like Richie Rich [the fictional, friendless millionaire child played by Macaulay Culkin in the eponymous movie] all grown up”. His hair was the first thing Mark noticed: grey roots pushing through bright red hair-dye, which lent the millionaire more than a passing resemblance to Ronald McDonald. Du Pont had thick dandruff and when he smiled, his teeth were “dark yellow and caked with food”. He had a thin physique but, as Mark writes in his memoir: “his belly looked as if he had swallowed a basketball”. At their initial meeting, Mark writes that du Pont was “obviously either drunk or stoned” and spoke in a slurred voice, punctuating his sentences with a constant repetition of the question “You understand what I’m saying?”

Still, working alongside du Pont wasn’t too bad to begin with. Although du Pont liked to think of himself as the chief coach, in practice Mark was left to get on with things. In 1987, Mark won the world championships.

Shortly afterwards, Mark persuaded his beloved older brother to come and join him. The two had always been close. They were born only 17 months apart and, following their parents’ divorce, Dave had become his younger brother’s protector and mentor. Dave, who struggled with dyslexia at school, found a refuge in wrestling and discovered a natural aptitude for the sport (his dyslexia meant that he was ambidextrous and could move equally well on both sides). Mark followed suit, and he, too, turned out to be a gifted wrestler. Their shared love of the sport brought them even closer, and an easy physical tactility existed between the two.

“Their family life wasn’t perfect, so they really bonded,” says Nancy. “They were so close, they were never separated. When I got together with Dave, I had to move in with Mark too! They were never more than 20 feet apart.” Mark, she says, saw his older brother as “his best friend… and life-support system”.

In wrestling circles, Dave was known to be generous, friendly and kind, always willing to teach other wrestlers his moves. He was hard on himself but not on others: Mark remembers one occasion when his older brother was so distraught over losing a match that he started punching himself in the face.

By the time Dave arrived at Foxcatcher, du Pont had built state-of-the-art training facilities, where a group of world-class wrestlers had made themselves at home. Du Pont offered Dave financial security and a family home in a guest house in the Foxcatcher grounds. It seemed like a no-brainer.

John E du Pont’s mansion on the Foxcatcher estate, where he holed up for two days after the shooting. Photograph: Tim Shaffer/AP

“It paid him a lot of money,” Mark Schultz explains over email. “There was no way I could have known things would play out like they did.”

There was a time, Nancy admits, when living at Foxcatcher was: “wonderful, beautiful. There were hundreds and hundreds of acres, horses, cattle and a working dairy farm… Training there was a utopia. There were other families living there. It was an amazing place.”

But the idyll would soon be shattered – by the very man who had created it.

Du Pont was born in 1938, the youngest of four children. When he was two, his parents divorced. After his older siblings moved out, John was left alone on the vast Foxcatcher estate with his mother, Jean. It was an isolated existence. He was an awkward child who found it difficult to socialise. At one stage, his mother even paid a boy called Hugh Cherry to be friends with him. It was an early lesson in how money could be used to buy you a facsimile of human affection.

The director Bennett Miller, who tracked Cherry down as part of his background research for the film, says du Pont needed “male figures in his life” because his father was no longer around. Dinner with the Cherry family consisted of hamburgers and pizzas around a small table in a rambunctious, loving environment.

By contrast, dinner at Foxcatcher would be a stilted affair, with the young du Pont at one end of a long dining table and his mother at the other, surrounded by staff. Miller says that when du Pont’s mother discovered he had been eating junk food with the Cherry family, she “raised hell” and put an end to the friendship. John’s loneliness continued into adolescence.

After attending the University of Miami, du Pont became a noted shell-collector and ornithologist, writing several books on the subject and naming some two dozen species of exotic birds.

But there was always a desire to compete athletically, perhaps springing from the need to prove himself as a man, and to be around other men. For a time, du Pont saw himself as a pentathlete and built a pistol range, a cross-country course and an indoor pool on the estate. The walls surrounding the pool were decorated with mosaic portraits of du Pont engaging in each of the five disciplines, with tiles shipped in especially from Italy.

He gave substantial sums of money to the local police force, outfitting every officer with the best body armour available. Again, he seemed to want acceptance. He let officers train on his shooting range. In return, they gave him an honorary badge, a siren and a radio for his car. He bought a tank and drove around the estate in it and regularly carried firearms.

Du Pont’s obsession with self-protection and security could occasionally veer into the paranoid. There was a short-lived marriage to Gale Wenk, an occupational therapist, whom he met in 1982 and married a year later. She left him after three months when he pulled a pistol on her and accused her of being a Russian spy.

When his mother died in 1988, du Pont’s eccentricities began to spiral into something much darker. Mark Schultz remembers him consuming vast amounts of cocaine and alcohol. His mind began to unravel. His estate was now the pre-eminent training ground for Olympic-level wrestlers who competed under the name “Team Foxcatcher”. Du Pont liked to pose as the chief coach, convincing himself he was a much-loved mentor for these young men whose camaraderie he craved. But the more he wanted their friendship and admiration, the more erratic his behaviour became and the more people drew away from him.

Wrestling had been Dave’s salvation at high school and he believed he understood what du Pont was looking for from the sport and that he could help him. Dave, in turn, “with his wrestling expertise, good looks, easy manner and charisma, was everything du Pont wanted and couldn’t be,” says his younger brother. “Everybody loved Dave. He was the most unselfish person I’ve ever met.”

But du Pont’s paranoia only got worse. On one occasion, he demanded that all the treadmills be removed from the gym because he was afraid they were taking him back in time. On another, he told all the black wrestlers to leave the facility. He had decided that there should be nothing black on the farm, because black was the colour of death. By the early 1990s, he was wearing an orange jumpsuit and insisting that visitors addressed him as the Dalai Lama.

“He was very odd,” Nancy Schultz says. “He was a heavy drinker and uncomfortable, socially awkward and arrogant and definitely peculiar. But, you know… as people become very wealthy, it removes them from a lot of normal day-to-day social interactions. It didn’t surprise me.”

As long as the money kept flowing and the wrestlers kept training, most people were willing to work around du Pont’s oddities. But Mark left in 1988, unable to cope with du Pont’s constant interference: “He became a daily nuisance, bothering me with dumb questions and getting in my personal space.”

Among those who remained, however, there was still an unspoken assumption that du Pont was an offbeat but essentially harmless man.

Bennett Miller compares the set-up to a cult. Over the phone, he lists the “essential ingredients” of a cult by way of comparison.

“One: a disaffected community – in this case, wrestlers who really got no material reward in the form of fame or fortune.

“Two: a charismatic leader – somebody who comes from another world with an idealistic vision.

“Three: a separation physically and geographically from the rest of the world. There are also recurring elements of paranoia [in a cult]… and you’re required as a cult member not to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

“You get attached to a vision and a reward and that allows you to justify any alarming signals that might contradict your faith in what’s going on. There’s a transaction that happens here – there’s a promise of some kind of transcendent outcome that you don’t want to let go of and an exchange begins, a series of compromises.”

Even when du Pont pulled a gun on wrestler Dan Chaid in 1995 and the incident was reported to the police, no one stepped in. The police, who had benefited from du Pont’s largesse, thought it was simply another example of John being John. Once again, his money had bought him a get-out.

Nancy says that she and her husband had tried on many occasions to get du Pont to seek help for his addictions: “He refused because he was worried that, if he admitted to an addiction, his family would come in and try to take his money from him. I think, in the end, John had done so much cocaine that he had lost his ability to know right from wrong or friend from foe.”

Dave and Nancy started talking about leaving Foxcatcher and their relationship with du Pont began to sour. This coincided with du Pont’s growing obsession with the Bulgarian wrestler Valentin Jordanov, who also lived at Foxcatcher. Dave, who had learned fluent Russian through attending wrestling competitions abroad, could communicate directly with Jordanov. Du Pont was said to be jealous of this closeness.

No one will ever fully understand du Pont’s motivation for doing what he did that cold January day in 1996. Du Pont himself never offered an explanation. After murdering Dave Schultz, the millionaire barricaded himself in his 44-room mansion for two days, prompting a stand-off with the police. When he was put on trial in 1997, du Pont pleaded not guilty “by reason of insanity”. One of the defence’s expert psychiatric witnesses diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. The jury eventually found him guilty but mentally ill and he was sentenced to 13 to 30 years.

From prison, he gave the order that the exterior of his family mansion, including all the windows, be painted black. It was, says Mark Schultz, “like a haunted house.” Du Pont died, in his cell, in December 2010 at the age of 72. He was alone.

By contrast, Dave Schultz’s passing had been marked by a packed memorial service held a month after his death. Larry Sciacchetano, the then president of USA Wrestling, gave a speech in which he described Dave as a man with “10,000 best friends”.

It took Mark a long time to come to terms with his brother’s death. At one point, shortly after leaving Foxcatcher, he fantasised about killing du Pont with a crossbow. He gave up competitive wrestling for a while, turning instead to mixed martial arts and then accepting a position as a wrestling coach at Brigham Young University in Utah where he converted to Mormonism. His faith, he says, has helped him to deal with Dave’s murder. Today, at 54, he is a motivational speaker in Oregon and has come to a fragile reconciliation with past events.